Recently John Winston Howard spoke to the Lowy Institute, defending his government’s decision to take Australia to war in Iraq in 2003. This against massive national and international protests against the US-led invasion of the time, which has since proven to have been based on – at the minimum – poor intelligence. At worst, a lie perpetrated for the purposes of regime change in direct contravention of UN Charter Chapter VII. In other words, an international crime.

Today we see yet another retired public servant of that era coming out with her own definitive claims that Howard lied to the Australian Parliament, and to the Australian people. This was long understood to be the case in the post-Iraq epoch, with the focus by those varied politicians of the so-called coalition of the willing changing from Weapons of Mass Destruction to “well look at the changes we’ve wrought in that downtrodden society”. The latter is surely NOT the point.

I for one never trusted Howard. Any politician who prevaricated and obfuscated on the level he did, from describing broken election promises as core and non-core to the never-ever GST to the internal shit fight between he & Costello about who said what to whom about standing aside from the leadership. The man was and remains an inveterate liar. Undoubtedly the reason Senator George Brandis – one of Howard’s own – labelled him the lying rodent.

In my view there is no rationale, no excuse, absolutely none, for taking a nation to war on the flawed pretext of what might be, in direct contravention of the UN Charter to which Australia is an originating, primary signatory. John Howard lied to you, to me to every single Australian, placed lives at un-necessary risk and wasted billions of tax-payer dollars on an ideological adventure demanded by another nation, to which he obsequiously complied. The man is, if nothing else, a low form of life. A wanna-be demagogue whose place in history deserves to remain forever tainted.